Tim Harris, CEO of Seven Lights, granted us a bit of his valuable time and subjected himself to our Q&A process. Steve talks a bit about The Continuum, the Seven Lights company, and generally give us a great rundown of the motivation and inspiration behind Seven Lights and The continuum. We could blather on, but really, Tim can speak for himself. So, let’s let him.
[Spewgilist.com] Tell us about the premise of your game
[Tim Harris ] The Continuum is an online collectible wargame which combines classic turn-based strategy gaming with a tactics-style RPG. Players will collect a variety of characters that they then organize into armies and develop through gameplay. Instead of developing one character, as in traditional RPGs, the player develops ALL of the characters in his armies every time they are used in battle.
The storyline will feature prominently in the game through an online and printed comic book series that introduces new characters, abilities and equipment. The difference between this and the typical storyline is that the gameplay of the players will affect the storyline and there will be opportunities for players and events themselves t make appearances in the official narrative.
[Spewgilist.com] Can you tell us a bit about the development cycle of your game?
[Tim Harris ] This is one of the key differentiators for The Continuum. We’ve designed the game from the ground up to be an iterative, collaborative process with the players. We’re introducing the game on the web, so that we can be very nimble and make changes, introduce features and add in content almost on a real-time basis. Thus, the development cycle has been shortened versus typical game—we’ve only been in production for a little over a year, and we won’t truly be done when we launch the game—in fact, we won’t ever be done… (that just made me dizzy—think I’ll go quit and get a new job).
[Spewgilist.com] It sound like one of those ‘I didn’t know it was loaded” moments. Tell us about some of the challenges during the development cycle.
[Tim Harris ] We’ve got two major challenges with the way we’re going about development—the first is the speed with which we’re getting this thing out. Anytime you decide to develop a game in an accelerated timetable, you’re going to have late nights, features on the cutting room floor, and high emotion. Don’t get me wrong—we made our bed here, and we’ll lay in it. We wanted to produce The Continuum as the first in a series of games that works on a model like I’ve described and part of that model is a no-frills development process. The frills come after we get the core game out in players’ hands, and they start to react to it.
The second challenge is the platform we’ve chosen. In order to both make the game as accessible as possible and give ourselves the ability to make changes and react to players quickly, we’re building it in Flash to be played in almost any browser. Flash wasn’t built to do the things we’re asking it to do, and we’re pushing it about as far as you can take a Flash application. We’ve been really pleased with the results, but there have been plenty of teeth-gnashing sessions at Seven Lights in the last few months.
[Spewgilist.com] Can you tell us some of what sets your game apart from others in the genre?
[Tim Harris ] It’s really the combination of elements that sets this game apart from others. We’ve all played turn-based strategy games, RPGs, and collectible games, but there isn’t really anything out there that combines those in quite this way. We’re presenting a squad-based combat system rather than a one-on-one scenario, so that you can either play a few characters in a gladiatorial-style quick game, or put hundreds of characters in the field to engage in epic clashes that build up your whole collection with experience points at the end.
[Spewgilist.com] Talk to us a bit about where your inspiration came from for the game.
[Tim Harris ] We’re psychotic fans as well as game designers. We love comic books, RTSs, TCGs, collectible miniatures games, Lost, ARGs, MMOs and just about everything out there that gives you the feeling that there’s a world to explore, a narrative that you can be a part of and a depth of content that you can’t ever hope to finish. It occurred to us that no one was really offering a game that lets you get as deep or as casual as you want to be while maintaining a meaningful experience for everyone. Ultimately, we got together to make a game we want to play and create a world we want to go to. We looked at typical game development and saw the “hit-or-miss-once-you-show-up-on-the-shelf” process and thought—there’s a better way to do this. Let’s combine game dev with web-style iteration and flexibility.
[Spewgilist.com] I'm in game, I want quick action and danger. Where do I go?
[Tim Harris ] Straight into a small scale game with someone who wants to play the quick battle on a small battlefield. The Continuum is based on head-to-head match-ups with people who have varying sizes of armies they want to field. You can be paired with someone who wants to get right into it rather than exploring the battlefields, which will be littered with loot and power-ups. Some games will take place on expansive maps that give the two sides the opportunity to fill up on equipment and other loot before engaging the enemy, while others will put you right next to opposing forces so that it’s go time, before you can get a few moves in.
[Spewgilist.com] The Continuum is a Turn Based Squad Game; talk to us about the advantages and disadvantages of Turn Based versus Real time.
[Tim Harris ] We’re fans of both, but they’re fundamentally different experiences. Turn-based games reward anticipating your enemy, combinations of power and deep thinking, where real-time games reward speed, patterns, and surprise. Both are highly strategic, just in a different way.
The advantages of turn-based strategy are that you can employ an enormous array of strategies and still have the game be fun. Styles of play are almost infinite, where you’ve got some very specific ways to play most RTSs. On top of that, you can find yourself experimenting with turn-based games in ways that the real-time frenzy doesn’t let you. On the flip side, there’s a visceral thrill to RTSs that is unique. There’s no casual messing around once you’re in a RTS—it’s go time. Ultimately, we’d like to do both turn-based strategy games and RTSs to accommodate different tastes.
[Spewgilist.com] If you had to pick one thing during development that made you sit back and saw "WOW!" what would it be?
[Tim Harris ] The day we realized that we had a visual design that accommodated the depth of the game while maintaining an easy interface got us pretty excited. You’ve got a lot of control over your characters in combat that you can elect to use, or elect to forgo. Not everyone will want to give individual orders to a possible 20 characters in a squad every round of combat, so the interface lets you give the whole squad one order or dive down into any character that has a usable ability and order him to use it individually.
[Spewgilist.com] If you had to pick one thing during development that made you sit back and say "DAMNIT!" what would it be?
[Tim Harris ] This thing is a beast to speed up. There’s a good bit of data passing back and forth from our servers to the players’ computers in every move and every combat instance. That makes for optimizations of data transfer that are driving us all to an early grave. We’ll get it all done, but man did we bite off a hellish challenge when we decided to do this in a browser.
[Spewgilist.com] The last line of code is done, the last graphic saved. What's next?
[Tim Harris ] We do two things—first, we translate the model into science fiction for a follow-up game. We’ll go from two levels of control (movement and combat in The Continuum) to three levels (space movement, ground movement, and combat) while maintaining the core gameplay. That game’s called The Pulse Gate and it’s got a ton of promise already.
The second thing we’ll do, I mentioned part of earlier—introduce a ton of new content for The Continuum. Not only will we add in new characters, abilities and equipment, but we’ll start releasing more casual game experiences around the core game—imagine taking the characters from your collection one t a time into a puzzle game, an action game, or a dungeon crawl that’s set within the game’s narrative continuity and lets them build up their skills and experience in a different way. We’re making The Continuum into an ever-expanding community, story and gameplay experience
[Spewgilist.com] Thanks Tim, we look forward to checking out the game and giving it an in-depth review, which, we feel certain, you will hold up to all other game reviewers as the gold standard for game reviews.
Modesty prevents us from saying more.